Nobody feels a greater sense of relief than I do that Biden has won this thing, but as I pointed out in my post yesterday, the madman might be gone, but the madness remains. And that's why all the happy talk about Biden being the man to unite the country is nonsense. He will be no more able to deal with Conservative media's fanning the culture war flames or Mitch McConnell's obstructionism than Obama was.
Don't get me wrong. It's hugely important that the country has voted Trump out, but a path to resolving the underlying economic and cultural structures that gave rise to Trump are still firmly entrenched, and Biden's famous empathy and schmoozing ability isn't going to change that.
I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, and I recommend it and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right for anybody who wants a fair, sympathetic representation of why Red America is so fearful and angry. Both books go a long way toward explaining why so many Americans are so ripe to be demagogued by a cynical con man like Trump. But, as much understanding and sympathy as you might find for Red America by reading these books, the bottom line remains that Red America is so ripe to be demagogued. As George Packer said in the quote I excerpted yesterday:
Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government.
Had that number been 35% of the electorate, it could be managed, but not when it is 48%.
So Biden's election warrants a sigh of relief, not jubilation. It feels rather like a temporary stay of execution to me rather than a pardon. Perhaps it buys us some time to find a solution. I hope so, but such a solution is not visible to me at so long as the Republicans hold the Senate. There is going to be a lot of talk about healing the partisan divide and bridging the nations's fissures, but none of that is possible unless there are significant changes on a deep structural level. And those changes are not possible so long entrenched power in this country uses culture-war issues to keep the body politic gridlocked by arguing about issues that simply cannot be resolved in the political sphere.
There is nothing so stupidly self-destructive as indulging in identity politics and culture wars that flow from them. And I'll agree with French to this extent--the stupidity is just as much a problem for the Left as for the Right. But the Left is better equipped to deal with the underlying structural issues that can be and must be faced and resolved in the political sphere.
I've been arguing for years that we need to agree to disagree about culture war issues so that the 99% can actually solve practical problems that are politically solvable as opposed to metaphysical problems that just are not. Maybe Biden has the ability to persuade most Americans to put culture-war issues aside, but I doubt it. Nothing benefits the interests of the 1% more than to keep us divided and conquered, and the 1% has conservative media and the McConnell-minted "originalist" courts to insure that the stasis of our divisions remains firmly in place. Stasis and gridlock serves powerful entrenched interests, not the rest of us.